More taxes paid, in aggregate, means that we can accomplish more as a society. That's simply a fact. It's how we have roads and the internet and electricity and a coast guard.
"can" is the key word here. Unfortunately, beyond basic infrastructure, the US government is incredibly wasteful and inefficient with tax money.
Never worked for a megacorp, eh? It's surprising how inefficient they can be and still make a huge profit.
Some of us hate giving so much to an entity that will waste it away. Some of us feel we can be much more efficient with those funds. In short, there is a limit to how much benefit that taxation will provide. Basic infrastructure is fine, let us manage the rest and reduce the size of bloated government.
Everyone wants an efficient government.
This.
It can be downright painful to witness government inefficiencies. But the profit-seeking world is ripe with inefficiency too. I've been in profit-seeking megacorp land for 10 years now, and I witness so much inefficiency. Fellow megacorp office employees, tell me if any of these situations sounds familiar.
1.) Someone wrote a computer mainframe program in the 1980s. Maybe they worked for your company. Maybe they worked for an outside vendor. Maybe they worked for a company that your company bought or sold a billion years ago. Either way, that person is long gone, maybe dead. But their program is vital to everything your company does, and it is a documentation-less black box. Everyone has to log into an ancient PC whenever they need to use this program.
2.) "That's not going to be me!" You said, as an enterprising young worker for megacorp. You ruthlessly document everything you do, big and small. Then one day, your boss asks you for some quick and dirty analysis. She's got a meeting by 3:00 PM. So you code and you code and you analyze. No time to document, but it's fine, she said quick and dirty. GREAT NEWS! The execs love your analysis. In fact, one of them loves it so much, that he built some big huge decision making matrix on top of it. And now he sends that to 60 people every month, and the all bolt their own tendrils onto it. Five years later, someone runs into a problem, and they trace it back to you, and you say, "What the fuck is this, I've never seen it before?".
3.) Your corp has noticed that an old (but stable) process is incredibly inefficient. So they've appointed a steering committee to build a new process. Meeting #1, a small group gets together and decides on a workable solution. Meeting #2, Jack Steerman brought in 5 other department heads to see how workable this solution is for them. All five of them bring up potential issues. The "do-ers" on the project can't "do" because they're held up by the results of the steering committee meeting. The project dies because everyone has other pressing priorities that they need to tend to.
Federal government work is the same way. When something grows large, it loses nimbleness. Change and adaptation becomes slow and difficult. So why do we allow these things to grow so big? Because big things can do things that small things cannot. And often times, the lack of nimbleness is made up for by economies of scale.
